Edward Hoch: Isaac Asimov's Worlds of Fantasy. Book 6: Mythical Beasties

The game was delayed an hour while they argued the point, disrupting television schedules around the world, but the commissioner finally ruled that she could play. The teams took the field- It would be centaur against centaur.

For the first few innings the crowd went wild each time Mark or his sister took the field. But it soon became obvious that each of them was so skilled in playing the outfield that nothing less than a home run would make it onto the scoreboard that day. Mark was the better hitter, probably because he'd been playing since July, but he only succeeded in hitting two high flies that Carza caught without any trouble. The crowd wanted hits, but all they were getting was a demonstration of some remarkable fielding.

As the ninth inning ended in a scoreless tie I spotted Lippy Lewis at a refreshment stand by the back of the stadium.

"How's it going, Lippy? I see you switched your allegiance from the Sox to the Cards."

"You gotta go with the smart money, Danny," he said, squeezing some mustard onto a hot dog.

"The smart money used to say you should never bet against the Yankees."

"Yeah? Well, we got our own centaur now."

The tenth inning had begun while we chatted, and suddenly there came a groan of anguish from the St. Louis fans. Lippy and I hurried to see what had happened, and 1 think we were equally horrified to see Carza tying on the field in obvious pain. She'd tripped while chasing a hard-hit grounder to center, and the ball had rolled ail the way to the outfield fence for a triple.

Mark hurried to her side as she was carried off the field.

"Marque," she murmured. "Take me home. I want to go home."

"Will they have to shoot her?" Lippy asked me.

"No. She's not a horse."

The Yankees won it, 1-0, and went on to win the Series, but that was the last game Mark Eques and his sister played.

Professor Hagger accompanied them back to the Greek island where he'd first found Mark. During their winter meeting the baseball managers voted to bar any players having more than two legs, whatever their species. The day of the centaur was over, as quickly as it had begun, It was sort of a sad ending to the story, and that was one reason I decided to fly over to Antikythira the following spring, to see how Mark and his sister were doing. I feared I'd have difficulty finding them, imagining that they'd retreated deep into their caves after their brush with fame, but 1 was wrong. Mark was running a messenger service-a sort of Centaur Express-and Carza had fully recovered from her injury.

"She's too old for the game," Mark explained. "I remember her playing ball when I was only a child."

"Will you ever play again?" I asked.

"Not in America. I heard they'd banned centaurs. But Carza and i arc talking about starting a league over here. An all-centaur league. We think there are enough good players, and it would make a great tourist attraction. We hope to get started by next year."

When I told Lippy Lewis about it, back in the States, he was interested. "Might be some betting action there," he decided, "once they get organized. But I'm sorry he didn't stay in this country and let me handle him."

"There are no more centaurs in baseball, Lippy," I reminded him.

"Who's talking baseball? I wanted to run him in the Kentucky Derby!"

The concept of the dragon was originally built up out of the fears of early human beings for the largest and most threatening reptiles with which they came in contact, the largest snakes and crocodiles. The very word comes from the Greek drakon, meaning a large snake.

Like the crocodile, the dragon was thick-bodied and had small legs. From the snake, some of which (though not the largest) were poisonous, it developed a fiery breath. (The poison, we can well imagine, might burn like fire when one is bitten by a snake.) Also because the snake moves unseen through the underbrush and comes upon you unaware. the notion of rapid movement, hence flight, was sometimes applied to the dragon, and it developed wings. (In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered the fossils of flying reptiles remarkably like dragons in some ways. but they had ail died out 65 million years ago and the similarity to the legend is purely coincidence.) Size, wings, fiery breath-so mighty, in imagination, did the dragons become that they began to represent elemental forces of nature, cruel and malevolent. Finally, they were viewed as the embodiment of the drive toward chaos, toward the destruction of the order built by the creative gods. In the Greek myths, the world could not be reconstructed after a universal flood till Apollo had slain a monstrous dragon called Python. (Large snakes are still called pythons today.) Similarly, in the Babylonian myths, the gods could not create the world till they had slain the dragon Tiamat. and there are rather obscure references in the Bible to God slaying Leviathan, who is pictured as the dragon of chaos.

In the/allowing story, a dragon is pictured as a personification of cold, not common in legend, and as not entirely malevolent.

Adara liked the winter best of all, for when the world grew cold the ice dragon came.

She was never quite sure whether it was the cold that brought the ice dragon or the ice dragon that brought the cold. That was the sort of question that often troubled her brother Geoff, who was two years older than her and insatiably curious, but Adara did not care about such things. So long as the cold and the snow and the ice dragon all arrived on schedule, she was happy.

She always knew when they were due because of her birthday. Adara was a winter child, born during the worst freeze that anyone could remember, even Old Laura, who lived on the next farm and remembered things that had happened before anyone else was bom. People still talked about that freeze. Adara often heard them.

They talked about other things as well. They said it was the chili of that terrible freeze that had killed her mother, stealing in during her long night of labor past the great fire that Adara's father had built, and creeping under the layers of blankets dial covered the birthing bed. And they said that the cold had entered Adara in the womb, that her skin had been pale blue and icy to the touch when she came forth, and that she had never wanned in all the years since. The winter had touched her, left its mark upon her, and made her its own.

It was true that Adara was always a child apart. She was a very serious little girl who seldom cared to play with the others. She was beautiful, people said, but in a strange, distant son of way. with her pale skin and biond hair and wide clear blue eyes. She smiled, but not often. No one had ever seen her cry. Once when she was five she had stepped upon a nail imbedded in a board that lay concealed beneath a snowbank, and it had gone clear through her foot, but Adara had not wept or screamed even then. She had puiled her foot loose and walked back to the house, leaving a trail of blood in the snow, and when she had gotten there she had said only,

"Father, I hurt myself." The sulks and tempers and tears of ordinary childhood were not for her.

Even her family knew that Adara was different- Her father was a huge, gruff bear of a man who had little use for people in general, but a smile always broke across his face when Geoff pestered him with questions, and he was full of hugs and laughter for Ten, Adara's older sister, who was golden and freckled, and fluted shamelessly with all the local boys.

Every so often he would hug Adara as well, especially when he was drunk, which was frequent during the long wintersBut there would be no smiles then. He would only wrap his arms around her, and pull her small body tight against him with all his massive strength, sob deep in his chest, and fat wet tears would run down his ruddy cheeks. He never hugged her at all during the summers. During the summers he was too busy.